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The Ugly Duckling

Pause Your Machinery: Accomplishing Your Goals

I mentioned earlier that I had the privilege of interviewing the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. At one point in our interview, he talked about his experience of how, through the mindfulness that he was developing through meditation, he was gaining a different perspective on his identity and all the other aspects of his program­ming that earlier in his life he thought of as all of who he was. He told me, “There’s another part of me that has nothing to do with that.”1

When I asked him about his personal definition of success, he said: “I’d say it’s awakening to your full potential as a human being, realizing that I am what I can be, not by criteria of money, power, fame—that all comes and goes—but just in the sense that I can feel the depths of my compassion now. I can feel the depths of the emptiness in my being. I can feel the depth of the joy and fun and play. I can feel my fears and desires . . . It’s as if I’m awakening just as fast as I can. It’s just going on.”

I believe this is the definition of success for all of us: awaken­ing to our full potential as human beings. Wherever you are on the journey, you are the perfect you at this moment, awakening to your full potential as a human being.

An excerpt from my recent book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, now available at Amazon.